<< April Fool Pranks! >>

Tomorrow is the 1st April and lots of people are planning on how they will fool their friends or family. Although I’m not the type to go all out on doing the best prank and probably regretting it for the rest of my life, I still like to have some fun! Anyway, I have compiled several pranks that you can pull on your friends’ computers – yeah computers…this is the digital age; no one gets hurt here!

1. The Fake Desktop Prank – Anyone can do this with their computers running any version of Windows. First, you take a snapshot of your desktop with all the icons as they usually are (make suer that the Start bar is set to autohide) using the Print Screen button on the keyboard. Open MS Paint and paste the picture in there, then save the image as a BITMAP. Now, return to your desktop and hide the icons (in Windows XP you can run the Desktop Cleanup Wizard that will move your icons to a folder; to hide the My Computer | My Documents | etc icons Display Properties > Desktop > Customize Desktop and uncheck the items to hide. After this your desktop should have no icons (or at least only a couple). Now go back into Display Properties and choose to set the BITMAP that you created earlier as your wallpaper.

It looks exactly as your original desktop except that none of the icons are clickable! Other users of the computer will get frustrated when trying to get into My Computer from the Desktop! Fooled you!

2. The Upside Down Desktop Prank – Now, this prank only works on some systems – I have found that it works on Dell computers. It may work on others; just give it a try. You can invert the display of your desktop by pressing the keyboard combination CTRL+Up or CTRL+Down. Other people will be forcing themselves to view the screen upside down. I was even told that some people (who thought it was a monitor problem) physically turned the monitor upside down since they didn’t know how to fix the “problem”!

Anyway, that’s about it. I couldn’t find any more. These should be safe pranks to do. Don’t go doing anything stupid now!